America’s Obituary or Rebirth

BossKitty  serves images of the future of the United States of America as seen by doomers and gloomers.  America the bankrupt has a lot of hard decisions to make.  Reality of current events is a huge slap in the face for many Americans whose short attention span has been focused on marketed trivia.  America has bragged and flaunted a way of life with plenty and freedoms for all.  This has never really been true, but the economic and political marketers have been successful selling that image for too many decades.  Europeans, Asians, Africans and South Americans have bought the sales job.

True, many immigrants have learned how to use American distraction to realize their dreams.  There are too many more that found the assault on their dignity was a hard price to pay for a piece of America’s sparkling dream.  America’s excesses and arrogance have caught up and are poised to devour the image of a dream.  Denial is no longer an option for Americans.  For too many,  this slap in the face will be the final straw.  Those Americans will not survive the massive change required to repair the damaged dream; loss of jobs, loss of retirement, loss of health care, loss of homes and loss of dignity in the eyes of the world.

For those young enough, strong enough and resilient enough, the future will be a test of survival.  The history of America is filled with contradictions and wonder.  The good and bad must be assimilated and learned from so a new and more honest America can emerge.  American history must be taught honestly so mistakes can be avoided during our rebuilding efforts.  Transparency and accountability have to be the first steps made, however shakey they may be.  As Americans ramp down their consumerism and hedonistic tendancies, more viable alternatives will start to appear.  After all, freedom is not free, it is the result of right actions, common goals and community thinking.

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.

“It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude.” ( Aldous Huxley in a 1962 speech at Berkeley)

As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.- In Moscow, Igor Panarin’s Forecasts Are All the Rage; America ‘Disintegrates’ in 2010

By ANDREW OSBORN

MOSCOW — For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument — that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. — very seriously. Now he’s found an eager audience: Russian state media.

Igor Panarin , PH.D., Dean, Diplomatic Academy of Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In recent weeks, he’s been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. “It’s a record,” says Prof. Panarin. “But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.”

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it’s his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin’s views also fit neatly with the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

The professor says he’s convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union — 15 years beforehand. “When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him,” says Prof. Panarin. 

Signs of a Kremlin Fearful Of Unrest

The mother of all paradoxes, the American social model

Even though today at the nadir of its profound social crisis because of its flagrant, outright failure, America continues unabashedly to hammer away at its people how fortunate they are, while simultaneously proposing itself to the world as the paradigm, the quintessence, the very epitome of western civilization. But is history not carrying America into a faded American Dream?

Thousands of stores to disappear in ’09

… with thousands of fewer stores, the “shop-’til-you-drop” mentality that has characterized American consumerism could be coming to an end.

Experts say disastrous holiday sales will force many more merchants into bankruptcy – and ultimately into liquidation.

With fewer jobs available, unemployed workers are taking any position they can find – even if it comes with a salary cut.

Nearly 2 million jobs were lost in 2008 and economists say the unemployment rate, which stands at 6.7%, will continue to rise into 2010.

“People realize that this is a different environment, said Jeff Joerres, chairman and CEO of employment services firm Manpower. “People are more anxious and are willing to secure something even if it is less.”

Bush’s Department of Legacy

Deep in the bowels of the White House an obscure and until today secret department has been activated. It hasn’t had any work since 1992 but undoubtedly P)resident Bush, like his father before him, has opened up the Department of Legacy to look after his reputation long after he leaves office on January 20th.

Bushed Legacy